THE FORM–FUNCTION PARADIGM

Implicit in the polemic about “functional” modernism was the assumption of a relationship between buildings and the members of society inhabiting them. As the issue has come to be understood since the 1960s, the problem was one of describing either the action of the social environment upon the form of the building, or conversely, of the action of the buildings upon society. The difficulty in giving a historical account of this issue is that while such ideas certainly existed, and indeed were crucial to modernism, they were but poorly articulated, and rarely, if ever, referred to as “functionalism” before the late 1920s.

The historical question that we have to try and account for is the turning of “function”

from a description of the action of a building’s own mechanical forces upon its form, into a description of the action of the social environment upon buildings, and of the action of buildings upon society. Crucial to this transformation is the introduction of the concept of “environment,” which, it will be noticed, we have not been able to avoid even in describing the phenomenon we are seeking to understand.

As a first step, we might ask how far modern “functionalism” differs from earlier, classical theories about the relationship of people to buildings. There is no doubt that the suitability of buildings to their uses was important in the classical theory of archi-tecture—it is part of what is covered by the Vitruvian term “commodity.” This category underwent considerable refinement in eighteenth-century France, and the specific term developed to describe a satisfactory relationship between buildings and their occupants was “convenance.” J. F. Blondel writing in 1752 made convenance the first principle of architecture, explaining what he meant by it as follows: “For the spirit of convenance to reign in a plan, each room must placed according to its use and to the nature of the building, and must have a form and a proportion relative to its purpose.”²⁵In English convenance was usually translated as “fitness”: for example J. C. Loudon, a prolific English architectural writer and publisher of the 1830s, followed Blondel’s classification fairly closely, rendering convenance as “fitness for the end in view,” and bienséance as

“expression of the end in view”:

An edifice may be useful, strong and durable, both in reality and in expression, without having any other beauties but those of use and truth; that is of fitness for

22. Greenough, Form and

the end in view, and of expression of the end in view; or, in familiar language, of being suitable to the use for which it was designed, and of appearing to be what it is.²⁶

The vagueness of both Blondel and Loudon as to what constitutes convenance or fitness is entirely characteristic of architectural theorists within the classical tradition who, while they considered a building’s suitedness to its use as necessary, had nothing that could be called a theory about it. Moreover what Blondel, Loudon and every other writer in the classical tradition lacked was any account of the relationship between building and use—

there was no suggestion that either one was in any way the outcome of the other; all that was required of the architect was to match the two together within an “appropriate character.” Convenance became an increasingly undynamic concept that gradually collapsed into “comfort.” (The significance of Horatio Greenough, it was suggested earlier, was his attempt to rescue convenance, or what he called “adaptation to use,” from stasis by linking it, through the German Romantic idea of “function,” to “character.”) However, what all these classical categories lacked—and it is this lack that distinguishes them from subsequent modernist notions of “function”—was any sense that the building fulfilled, in a mechanical sense, the requirements of the society within which it was produced. To argue this, it was necessary to have both a theory of society, and a theory of social causes and effects, and it is precisely the presence of such theories in modern functionalism that sets it apart from classical convenance.

The source of the theory of society that altered the understanding of the relation of buildings to use was, of course, biology. What biology gave to the study of society was, in addition to the notions of “function” and of “hierarchy,” the concept of milieu, or

“environment.” What classical convenance lacked, and what modern functionalism contains, is this notion that human society exists through its interaction with the physical and social surroundings. Indeed, it cannot be stressed too strongly that without “envi-ronment” modern functionalism would not exist (and conversely, whenever one meets the words “environment,” or the other coefficient in the functionalist equation, “the user,”

one can be sure that functionalism is not far away). However, what is peculiarly difficult to establish is when, where and how this paradigm entered the discourse of architecture:

we can confirm its absence in the eighteenth century, and we can be sure of its presence in the second half of the twentieth century, but what happened in between? This territory was explored by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, and again more recently by Paul Rabinow in French Modern, but we are still very far from understanding how this ubiquitous concept, “environment,” became established within modern thought. The best we can do is to summarize some of the better-known points on the way.

Milieu or environment was a concept basic to the understanding of changes in plants and animals from Aristotle’s time, but where Aristotle and his successors saw the relationship between the organism and its surroundings as harmonious and balanced, a decisive change was made in the late eighteenth century by Lamarck, who saw the

DIALECTICAL READINGS IN ARCHITECTURE: USE

26. John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (London: Longman, 1833), 1114.

relationship as basically unstable: an active organism seeks endlessly to attach itself to its milieu, which is indifferent to its survival, causing the organism to adapt. Adopted by social theorists such as Saint-Simon in the early nineteenth century, Lamarck’s theory of the relationship of organisms to their environment became a highly popular model for the understanding of social process. It constitutes, for example, the theme of Honoré de Balzac’s cycle of novels written in the 1830s and 1840s, La Comédie humaine; in the first, Le Père Goriot (1835), dedicated significantly to the Lamarckian naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the fortunes of the occupants of a Paris lodging house are described through their adaptation to their surroundings. But in the identification of its application to architecture and urbanism, we have to be more circumspect. While a writer like Viollet-le-Duc recognized the significance of social conditions (indeed, in Lecture X it was an important part of his argument in explaining why the same principles of construction, when applied in different times and places, produced different results) it was presented only in general terms and there was no reciprocal theory of the action of buildings upon society. Likewise, Leopold Eidlitz in 1881 insisted that “what should be impressed on the mind of the architect is that architectural forms, like all art organisms, and like the organisms of nature, are the result of environments”; but again, we have here no more than a one-way process.²⁷On the other hand, by the end of the nineteenth century, in the English model villages built by reformist manufacturers for their employees, and in the early productions of the garden city movement, there was a clear implication of the converse process, of buildings acting upon inhabitants. And in Tony Garnier’s imaginary Cité Industrielle of 1901–4, there was a definite assumption about the relationship between the layout and buildings of the city and the way of life of the residents, consistent with the thinking of the Musée Social group. Rabinow, who discusses this era of French social and spatial thinking in some detail, comments that the rise of the “social question”

corresponds with the collapse of the liberal laissez-faire political economy, and the assumption by the state of responsibility for the welfare of its citizens; interest in milieu, and faith in “functionalism” (even if it is not known as such), were part of this process, and came to the fore in the social democratic regimes of Weimar Germany, and then of post-war western Europe.²⁸

Another, rather different line of argument traces the influence of the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats, and of Scottish Political Economy. The early nineteenth-eighteenth-century Utilitarians, coming out of these traditions, believed in the need for the adjustment of the parts of the society for the greater good of the whole. Buildings had a part in this by bounding particular parts of the world—Bentham’s Panopticon is the most famous example, but the same principle underlay the building of not only prisons, but also other institutional buildings, schools, hospitals and asylums. It was particularly in factories that the ideal of the harmonious action of many social units to the good of all was most comprehensively applied. But we should be careful not to assume, as there has been a tendency to do recently, that these institutions manifested an incipient modern func-tionalism. When the French architect L. P. Baltard commented in 1829 of English prisons

27. Eidlitz, The Nature and Function of Art, 467.

28. Rabinow, P., French Modern:

Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 169.

that they “function like a machine subject to the action of a single motor,” he was referring to the harmony of routine within the prison, not to its action upon the inmates; and similarly it was “the idea of a vast automaton, composed of mechanical and intellectual organs acting in uninterrupted concert” that so excited Andrew Ure in 1835 about the cotton-mills of Manchester.²⁹In so far as either prisons or factories affected the moral state of those within them, early nineteenth-century contemporaries attributed this to the regimen operated in them, not to the buildings themselves; contrary to the implication of some recent historical writing, it is very hard indeed to find any evidence in the first half of the nineteenth century of a belief that behaviour could be modified by the form of a building. But this distinction is admittedly a fine one, and by the late nineteenth century, when progressive manufacturers started to extend the principle of organization within the factory to the lives of their employees outside the factory, by building model housing for them, the distinction had become imperceptible. At Bournville, for example, Cadbury’s model village outside Birmingham, the expectation that the houses and their layout would of themselves bring about a change in the life and social development of the inhabitants was clear.

However, at no point did contemporaries refer to any of these developments as

“functional,” nor is there a “theory” known by any other name that can be attached to these practices. The invention of a historical narrative descriptive of the development of a practice of functionalism through these and other nineteenth-century examples has been the work of historians in the last thirty years. Similarly, the creation of anything like a theory of “functionalism,” synthesized from the disparate range of ideas and historical examples that we have discussed, only emerged in the 1960s when architects and critics started to react against modernism; modernist architects whose approach one might be tempted to describe as “functionalist,” like Sir Leslie Martin, were in general extremely careful to distance themselves from any implication of determinist thinking.

One of the first and most famous works to take issue with orthodox modernism was Aldo Rossi’s highly influential book The Architecture of the City, first published in Italian in 1966. Rossi’s critique of “naïve functionalism” is an important part of his argument that the architecture of a city consists of generic types in which its social memory is preserved; European cities consist of buildings that have largely outlasted their original purposes without any loss of meaning, making function an irrelevance for their continued existence. “Naïve functionalist classifications . . . presuppose that all urban artifacts are created to serve particular functions in a static way and that their structure precisely coincides with the function they perform at a certain moment.”³⁰He continues:

function alone is insufficient to explain the continuity of urban artifacts; if the origin of the typology of urban artifacts is simply function, this hardly accounts for the phenomenon of survival . . . In reality, we frequently continue to appreciate ele-ments whose function has been lost over time; the value of these artifacts often resides solely in their form, which is integral to the general form of the city.³¹

DIALECTICAL READINGS IN ARCHITECTURE: USE

29. Louis-Pierre Baltard, Architectonographie des Prisons, (Paris: Louis-Pierre Baltard, 1829), 18, 13.

30. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 55. First published in 1966.

31. Ibid., 60.

In fact, though, Rossi’s own conception of “functionalism” was vague: it gathers substance only in so far as it provided him with an antithesis for his notion of “type,” and thus enabled him to argue for the primacy of form.

Writing not long after Rossi, the French philosophers Henri Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard both display a similar impulse to define “functionalism,” not so much from any interest in it for its own sake, but because it helped them to develop their arguments about modernity. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, “functionalism” was one of the features of “abstract space,” that flattened, homogenized, asphyxiating form of space characteristic of modern capitalist societies.³²At one point, says Lefebvre, “The science of space should . . . be viewed as a science of use,” but, he warns, “It would be inexact and reductionist to define use solely in terms of function, as functionalism recommends.”

“Functionalism,” he continues, “stresses function to the point where, because each function has a specially assigned place within dominated space, the very possibility of multi-functionality is eliminated.”³³In place of the limitations imposed by a functional approach to use, Lefebvre was interested in the co-option of space (he gives the example of early Christianity’s co-option of the Roman basilica), for it is through such processes that subjects themselves directly achieve the production of a lived, “social space.” For Lefebvre (and he has this in common with Rossi), “functionalism” impoverishes because it fixes use.

To Baudrillard, concerned with the tendency of capitalism to displace commodities by their sign, “functionality is nothing other than a system of interpretation”: it is a wholly arbitrary (though seemingly rational) attempt to fix the meaning of objects according to their use and so protect them against the effects of fashion.³⁴“When one ponders it, there is something unreal and almost surreal in the fact of reducing an object to its function:

and it suffices to push this principle of functionality to the limit to make its absurdity emerge.”³⁵Baudrillard saw functionalism and surrealism as necessary opposites; func-tionalism pretended that form signified use, while “surrealism plays upon the distance instituted by the functionalist calculus between the object and itself . . . Fusion of the skin of breasts and the folds of a dress, of toes and the leather of a shoe: surrealist imagery plays with this split by denying it.”³⁶

These examples will suffice to show that not just in architecture, but in a variety of disciplines, to give functionalism specific attributes was a necessary part of developing a critique of modernism, and of modernity in general. Historical study took a corresponding course. The extensive investigation of the histories of particular building types, schools, hospitals, prisons, town halls etc., from the late 1960s may be seen as part of a general attempt to find some basis for the form–function paradigm. But there are two books in particular from this period, Peter Collins’s Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (1965) and Philip Steadman’s The Evolution of Designs (1979), that set out to find a pedigree for functionalist thinking in architecture, and in particular to identify the origin of the notion that environment acts upon form: both Collins and Steadman located this in Lamarck’s theory of evolution. Yet although it may be perfectly true that some twentieth-century notions of function do correspond to Lamarckian ideas, there is disconcertingly

32. Henri Lefebvre, The Production

34. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy

little evidence, as we have already seen, that any nineteenth-century architect or architectural theorist (with the possible exceptions of Horatio Greenough and James Fergusson) ever understood “function” to mean this, nor had any but the vaguest interest in architecture as part of the interaction between mankind and its environment. Though architectural writers were fond of the biological analogy in relation to theories of construction, there is only the most fragmentary evidence to suggest that they might have seen it as a means to develop an account of architecture as a social phenomenon. If Lamarck’s theory of organism-environment is indeed the origin of the modern notion of functionalism, it seems more likely to have reached architecture via sociology than from any direct analogy with biology.

While in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s we see the assembly from the scattered fragments of earlier thinking of a more or less coherent account of func-tionalism—largely so as to denigrate it—in the period since there have been various attempts to recuperate “function.” These have come from people acting with widely different intentions. On the one hand, we have the architect Bernard Tschumi, who, introducing an anthology of his articles from the 1970s and 1980s, explained their general theme as follows: “Opposing an over-rated notion of architectural form, they aim to reinstate the term function and, more particularly, to reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.”³⁷That Tschumi chose, in 1996, to present his earlier views in this manner was a not-so-oblique lunge at Peter Eisenman, who, for the previous twenty years, had been broadcasting pro-form, anti-function views. In fact, an examination of Tschumi’s own earlier views shows him to have been a good deal more critical of “function” than the 1996 remarks suggest. While he had consistently been interested in the realization of event, activity, movement and conflict, earlier he had regarded “function” as inadequate to describe these. In 1983, he had written:

By going beyond the conventional definition of “function” the [Manhattan]

Transcripts use their combined levels of investigation to address the notion of the program . . . To discuss the idea of program today by no means implies a return to notions of function versus form, to cause and effect relationships between program and type or some new version of utopian positivism. On the contrary, it

Transcripts use their combined levels of investigation to address the notion of the program . . . To discuss the idea of program today by no means implies a return to notions of function versus form, to cause and effect relationships between program and type or some new version of utopian positivism. On the contrary, it